Final Flight

18

Toad Tarkington sat at the bar of the Vittorio and watched the desk in the lobby reflected in the mirror. He had sipped his way through two slow beers and now a third beer sat untouched on the table before him. He was hungry and tired and discouraged. Maybe she would never come. But why hadn’t she checked out of her room? Sooner or later she had to come to that desk and ask for messages or check out.

Behind him a crowd was gathering. It looked like a wedding reception. Men in formal dress and women in sharp fashions gathered around a table of hors d’oeuvres against the back wall. The bartender passed drinks across the counter to the lively crowd. The volume was rising. Toad didn’t understand a word of it. Couples entering the lounge kept obscuring his view, but he kept his eyes on the mirror anyway.

When he could stand it no longer, he used the house phone on the end of the bar and dialed her room. Perhaps she had come in the back way, avoiding the lobby. He let it ring ten times before he hung up and returned to the bar.

And then she was there, against the lobby counter, looking at the key boxes behind the desk and glancing at the clerk. Toad stood quickly, then eased back into his seat.

Let her read the letter first, he decided. He had spent two hours this afternoon writing and rewriting the two pages, two long hours devoted to the most important letter of his life. The letter said the things that he had never been able to say — had never before wanted to say — to any woman. She should read it first, he concluded, trying to quell his feeling of unease.

She spoke to the clerk and he handed her the envelope. She looked at both sides of the envelope carefully, glanced around the lobby — her gaze even passed over the people going into the bar — before she opened it with a thumbnail.

Her hair was piled carelessly on top of her head. Even at this distance Toad could see stray locks. She was wearing a nondescript dark jersey, a modest skirt, and flat shoes. A large purse hung on a strap over one shoulder.

He watched her face expectantly as she read. Her expression never changed. Her eyes swept the crowd again and returned to the letter. As she finished the first page her attention was back on the crowd. She scanned the second page. Now she was folding the pages and replacing them in the envelope, now looking at the envelope, now tapping it against her hand as she searched the faces of the wedding guests.

He stepped into the doorway and she saw him.

Toad started toward her only to hear the barman’s shout. He fumbled in his pocket and found some bills. He threw a wad on the bar and crossed the lobby toward her.

“Judith, I …”

“Hello, Robert.” Her features softened. “Ill keep this,” she said and tucked the envelope into her purse.

“Hey, uh …” He couldn’t think of anything to say and yet he knew he should be saying the most important things he had ever said. “Listen …”

But she was looking away, her eyes tense and expectant. Toad followed her gaze, A lean man with stringy blond hair and carrying a backpack was standing in the door that led to the rear courtyard and looking at her.

“I have to go, Robert. You are very, very kind.”

“At least give me your phone number, your address. I’ll …”

“Not now, Robert. Later.” She was moving toward the courtyard door and he was moving with her. She put a hand on his chest. “No, Robert. Please,” she said firmly. He stopped dead. She bussed his cheek and disappeared through the door.

He stood stock still, unsure of what had happened. She had read the letter. She knew he loved her. He looked around the lobby, at the starkly modern designer furniture, the second-floor balcony, the artsy chandeliers, the bright green drapes, the anonymous dressed-up people coming and going. Of course she didn’t love him, but she had to give it a chance. Then he knew. There was another man — a husband or a lover. Oh Christ, he had never even considered that possibility.

He turned and walked down the hall toward the rear courtyard, hurrying.

There was someone lying in the courtyard. Toad froze in the doorway.

Judith and the man with the backpack stood over the prone figure. And there was another man, one wearing a workman’s shirt and cap, with a tool case at his feet. He had something cradled in his hands. In the semidarkness it was hard to see. The workman used his foot to turn the body over.

“That isn’t him,” Judith said softly, her voice carrying very well within this enclosure.

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, who is it?” Her voice was tense.

“It’s Sakol,” the workman said in a flat, American Midwest voice. “We’ve been after him for a long time. I had to do it.”

“You fool,” she said fiercely. She took an object from her purse and spoke into it. “Everyone inside. Hit the door. Now.” She dashed toward the entrance to the other wing of rooms. As she went under the dim entryway bulb, Toad saw that she was carrying a pistol. The two men were right behind her. Now Toad could see what it was that the workman carried at high port — a submachine gun.

Toad crossed the courtyard and stared at the man lying on the stones. He was on his back now, eyes and mouth open, a wicked bruise on his cheekbone. Little circles of blood stained his shirt around five holes in his chest. The holes were neat and precise, stitched evenly from armpit to armpit.

God Damn! Holy Mother of Christ!

He heard muffled, stuttering coughs and the sounds of shattering glass and splintering wood.

A distant shout: “He’s on the roof.”

Pounding footsteps clattered on the stairway that Judith had gone up. She came flying out, followed by the man with the backpack. He had a submachine gun in his hands and the fat barrel pointed straight at Toad as he moved.

She ran toward the corridor to the lobby. “Get out of here,” she hissed at him and the man with her gestured unmistakably with his weapon.

Someone three or four stories up, inside the hotel, was shouting in Italian. Cursing, probably.

Toad looked again at the dead man at his feet. This was the first body he had ever seen that wasn’t in a casket. He found himself being drawn toward the lobby inexorably, almost against his will.

The lobby was full of people. A young woman in a white formal gown was wending her way toward the bar, acknowledging the applause and handshakes. Her new husband, wearing a tux, followed at her elbow, shaking hands with the men and bussing the women.

The blond man was bending over near a large potted fern. His backpack lay on the floor near him, by his right hand. Toad looked for Judith. She was behind a group near the elevators, watching the floor indicators above the stainless-steel doors.

The workman faced the elevators, his submachine gun pressed against his leg.

For the love of …! “Look out!” Toad roared. “He’s got a gun!” Startled faces turned toward him.

Toad pointed. “He’s got a gun!”

Women screamed and the crowd surged away from the gunman.

The elevator door opened.

The blond man had the butt of the weapon braced against his hip, spent cartridges flying out. The sound of shattering glass from the elevator was audible, and a low ripping noise and the screams and shouts of the panicked crowd, some of whom were on the floor and some of whom were trying to flee, shoving and pushing and sprawling over those lying on the carpet. The gunman fired one more burst, picked up his backpack, and ran for the courtyard corridor.

Something hard was pressed against Toad’s back. “Follow him,” Judith ordered, and pushed him toward the archway. Over his shoulder Toad could see a bloody body lying half-in, half-out of the elevator.

The bride stood horrified in the middle of the lobby, staring at the body being crushed by the closing doors of the elevator. A woman somewhere was screaming.

“Quickly,” Judith urged.

They were in the corridor. She pushed him hard. “Run.” She had a pistol in her hand. It had a long, black silencer on the barrel as big as a sausage. Even in the dim light Toad could see the hole in the end pointed at him.

He ran.

At the street entrance to the courtyard, men carrying weapons were racing toward them, at least four of them. A van careened around a corner and screeched to a stop.

As the men piled in the back Judith shouted, “Him, too.” Someone grabbed Toad and hurled him toward the van. He was thrust facedown onto the floor and a heavy foot planted itself on the back of his neck.

The van accelerated at full throttle for fifty feet, then the engine noise dropped. “You asshole,” someone said loudly. “You killed the wrong man. You blew it, fucker!” Three or four of them began talking at once.

“Silence!” It was a command. Judith’s voice.

He could smell the sweat and hear them breathing hard over the street noises and the eternal quacking of automobile and motor-scooter horns. He could hear the distinctive clicks and hisses of a two-way radio conversation, muted, from the front of the vehicle, the voices low and indistinct. He concentrated on the tinny voice from the speaker and concluded it was a foreign language, one he didn’t recognize. Cutting through all the noises was the distant, two-tone panic wail of a siren. Two sirens, moaning out of sync.

He could tell from the road noises, the short accelerations and brake applications, that the van was cruising in traffic. Time passed. How much Toad didn’t know. The sirens eventually became inaudible.

When he felt his legs cramping and he could stand it no longer, he said, in as conversational a tone of voice as he could muster, “Take your foot off my neck, please.”

The pressure increased. He raised his voice, “I asked you nice. Take your fucking foot off my neck!”

“Okay, let him up.” Judith’s voice.

“He’ll see our faces.” It was the flat, American Midwest voice.

“He ought to see yours.” Another male voice. This was a heavy accent, perhaps Eastern European. “You agency assholes want to be included, then you fuck it up.”

“Shut up, everyone,” Judith said. “Let him up.”

He was pulled bodily toward the rear of the van and turned into a sitting position. Hands seized his face. They were Judith’s hands. Her face was only inches from his. “Don’t look around.”

The light came through the back windows of the vehicle — headlight glare and occasional streetlights. Her eyes held his as the lights came and went. They were the most intelligent, understanding eyes he had ever seen.

“Don’t ever tell anyone what you’ve seen or heard. Promise me! Not a word.”

Her eyes held him.

“Oh, Judith! Why you?”

“If you tell, people will die. Not you. Other people. Good people.”

“You?”

“Perhaps.”

“I don’t even know your real name.”

“Don’t tell,” she whispered fiercely and increased the pressure of her hands on his temples.

“I love you.”

The van came to a halt and the rear door opened. “Get out.” As he did so, he heard her say, “I’ll keep the letter.”

The van accelerated into traffic. He was beside a pedestrian island in the middle of a vast piazza. Buses were parked in rows across the street from him. To his right was the central train station, easily recognizable with the black triangles on the low, flat roof. He was in the Piazza Garibaldi.

Then he remembered that he should have looked at the license number on the van. He wildly scanned the traffic, but it was gone. He had been looking at the little rear window when it pulled away. Pedestrians were staring at him.

He put his hand in his pockets and began shuffling along.

Jake and Callie were having dinner in a storefront trattoria on the Via Santa Lucia famous among U.S. Sixth Fleet sailors. Unit patches covered three large mirrors in the crowded dining room. The floor was linoleum and round bulb lamps hung from the ceiling. Pictures of American ships and airplanes in cheap black frames adorned the dingy wallpaper. Two men in their fifties served the noisy customers at the fifteen tables.

An Italian couple at the next table was slaughtering a pizza and demonstrating the proper use of the knife and fork on this delicacy to their daughter, who was about eight. The utensils were used to roll up the triangular slice until it looked like a blintz, then the fork was stabbed through it and the pizza roll raised to the mouth, where one took a delicate bite from one end. The youngster was having her troubles with the technique. Red sauce and gooey cheese dribbled down her chin.

The little brother was peeking at Jake. Jake winked. The boy averted his face, then peeked again. Another wink. The little head jerked away, then inched back around very, very slowly. Jake grinned.

“Kids are great, aren’t they?” Jake remarked.

“Oh, you think so?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Then you won’t mind if we adopt?”

Jake hitched himself up in his chair and stared at his wife. She sipped her wine and gazed innocently around the room with a trace of a smile on her lips, her eyebrows slightly arched, the corners of her eves minutely crinkled. God, she was beautiful!

He grinned. “Anyone specific in mind, or will a generic kid do?”

Her eyes swiveled onto him like two guns in a turret, then her head followed. “She’s ten years old. Her name is Amy Carol. She has black hair and black eyes and a smile that will break your heart.”

“And …”

“She has diabetes. She’s been in four foster homes and she needs a family of her own. She was sexually abused in her first foster home, and the man went to prison. She doesn’t like men.”

Jake’s smile faded. “Well …”

“She needs us, Jake. Both of us. She needs love and understanding and a place of her own and a man who can be a loving father.”

Jake took a deep, deep breath, then exhaled through his nose. Callie had mentioned adoption casually in the months before the United States sailed on this cruise, but it had been so tentative — newspaper clippings left for him to see, occasional dinner conversations, all of it casual and distant, a social phenomenon worthy of a few minutes of notice. And she had been testing the water! He sat now slightly baffled, trying to recall just when and how he had lost sight of the pea. The little girl at the next table caught his eye. She had tomato sauce smeared all over the lower half of her face and running down her fork, which she held like a sword in her right fist.

“Amy Carol Grafton. When do we get her?”

“Oh, Jake,” Callie exclaimed and dashed around the table. She sat on his lap and enveloped him. People at the neighboring tables applauded enthusiastically as Callie gave him a long, passionate kiss. After all, this was Italia.

Qazi leaned back against the sink. Noora and Ali sat at the kitchen table with Youssef and the senior helicopter pilot.

“So Sakol and Yasim are dead?”

“The police radio says they are.”

“Sakol is no loss,” Ali sneered. “But Yasim is. Who were these people?” Ali asked the question of Qazi.

“I don’t know. I heard the silenced automatic weapon in the courtyard. I heard them speaking English. I looked. One of them was a woman, perhaps Judith Farrell. We had finished listening to the tapes Yasim had flagged, and Sakol had left.”

“Why did you let him leave?” Ali asked. “He could betray us.”

“My judgment. My decision. We shook hands and he left. A few moments later we heard the shots and I looked out the window. We ran toward the stairwell and started down. Then we heard someone running up. So I went up onto the roof. Yasim must have decided to go back through the corridor and take the elevator down to the lobby. He probably figured it would be safe with all the people there.”

“So they killed him in the lobby.”

“Apparently. He isn’t here and the police are telling each other there are two bodies.”

“Yasim is a martyr,” Youssef said. “He’s on his way to paradise.” Youssef was a Palestinian, the senior man in the PLO contingent that El Hakim had foisted on Qazi. Political considerations. The PLO needed a success just now, and El Hakim would need the PLO if this operation was to pay the kind of dividends the dictator hoped it would. So the PLO should earn a share of El Hakim’s glory. Not too much of it, of course, but an expedient little bit of the shine. Too bad, Qazi thought bitterly, that the Palestinians’ primary asset was enthusiasm.

“What do the Americans know?” Ali asked.

“This afternoon Captain Grafton and his wife discussed the fact Farrell is not a native English-speaker. Apparently they were worried she would entrap Lieutenant Tarkington, one of the officers from the ship. Grafton had the Americans searching for Tarkington this afternoon, apparently without success. Then the Graftons went out. Grafton is suspicious and worried, but he really knows nothing.”

“Someone knows something,” Ali said. “If that assassination team is waiting at the helicopters or the Americans are warned or the Italians are alerted, we won’t succeed.”

“At last,” Qazi said acidly, “you begin to appreciate some of the basic facts.”

Ali said nothing.

“I’m worried about the weather,” the pilot said. “The winds are going to get gusty, and we’ll have rain showers under a low overcast. It may get very rough in the air tonight.”

“Is it possible to fly?”

“Yes, it’s possible, if the forecast is accurate. But if the weather is worse than forecast, it will be dangerous. There will be no margin for error.”

“And in Sicily?”

“The weather should be better there. That is the forecast, anyway.”

“So there are many factors we cannot control. We knew that when we were planning.”

Youssef spoke. “The PLO does not want this mission to fail. The chairman has given the orders. My men and I are ready to proceed regardless of the danger.”

Qazi ignored him.

“Could we wait a day?” Noora asked. “The weather might improve.”

“They may dispose of the crate on the ship. The carabinieri or the GRU or the CIA or the Mossad or the Mafia may catch on.” Qazi ticked them off on his fingers. “There is already at least one assassination team out there on the hunt. And Yasim or Sakol may still be alive, and the police-radio conversations just a ruse. If either is alive, he can be made to talk. The risk increases every minute we wait. It’s now or never. Do we go?”

Noora and Ali looked at each other, then back at Qazi. They both nodded yes.

Qazi slapped his hands together. “Okay. Youssef, load the vans. Noora, get Jarvis to supervise the loading of the trigger. Then line the men up for inspection. Ali and I will check every man. When that is done, we’ll pull in the guards and be on our way.” He looked at his watch. “We leave in twenty-seven minutes. Go!”